Your eyes got there first
Branding touches everything. Here’s why the visual part matters most.
Part 2 of 5. This week I’m putting what I believe about brand in writing, one question a day.
What is the importance of brand visuals?
The hard part about branding is that it is all-encompassing. Since the brand is an emotional resonance and gut feeling, everything from sales calls, websites, to the smell of your office plays a role in its formation.
Even the little chime your app makes when a payment goes through is part of it, which is sonic branding.
But if I had to pick the one piece that matters most, it’s the visual design, and the reason is biology.
We are a visual species. Roughly 30% of your cortex is devoted to vision, compared to about 8% for touch and 3% for hearing (Discover magazine, “The Vision Thing: Mainly in the Brain,” 1993).
The same machinery that helped our ancestors pick a mate, pick a place to live, and spot a predator in the tall grass is the machinery deciding how people feel about your homepage.
Your eyes tell you something is off before you can explain why, or whether something deserves your attention before you’ve decided to give it.
Brands get no exemption from that.
Researchers at Carleton University flashed web pages at people for 50 milliseconds, about the length of a single frame of TV, and asked them to rate how appealing each one looked. Those snap judgments matched the ratings people gave after looking much longer (Behaviour & Information Technology, 2006). In short, before you tell me "they just have to see the product," or "yea, we look bad, but..." but nothin'! You're starting at a disadvantage.
Judgement arrives before anyone has read a word.
Even your words get felt through visuals. A few weeks ago I set the same six words in a wedding typeface and a horror-movie typeface. Here it is again for reference:
Same copy. One was an invitation, the other was a threat. Your tone of voice isn’t living in the writing nearly as much as you think. How the writing looks with respect to typography and layout play a much bigger role in developing your brand personality.
That’s why visual design isn’t the decoration on top of a brand, it's capable of driving business impact.
Three numbers good design moves:
Lower CAC
People trust what looks trustworthy, and trust is the expensive part of acquiring a customer. When you pass the gut check, more of the traffic you already paid for converts, so every customer costs you less.
This also plays a role in a prospects ability to digest and read information. The more clearly and effectively the details needed for a buyer to make a decision are displayed, the more likely they are to purchase.
A premium price
Buyers compare at face value. With features becoming less and less of a differentiator, the brand that looks the part gets to charge more or charge the same and reap higher volume.
Higher LTV
This is mainly where the product’s own design takes over. A product that’s clear and delightful to use keeps people around. One that’s clunky and confusing churns them out, no matter how good the homepage looked.
But, if you can use design and visuals to create a phenomenal experience in product-adjacent moments (eg. retention emails, advertising, new feature releases, or social media interaction), you also build up a good will bucket outside of a product that is a delight to use.
Everyone is judging your book by the cover
I hate to break it to you, but your mom, teachers, and cliched librarians were absolutely, wrong. We, yes, you included, absolutely judge books by their covers.
Show up to a first date without putting your best foot forward and you’re letting that person down. You’re telling them you didn’t care enough to make a good impression.
Sure, a lot of things matter in branding. The way your product works. How your salespeople treat their prospects. The words you use, the sounds in your product, the little bits of delight intentionally scattered everywhere... even the smell of your office.
But your visual identity is the part people run into first, and it's the part they run into most. It’s the cover everyone is judging, and they can’t help it. It’s simply their biology.
— Zach
